The comedy thread

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Re: The comedy thread

Postby justdrew » Sat Nov 05, 2011 12:33 am

By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
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Re: The comedy thread

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Nov 09, 2011 3:49 pm

Matt Berry as Todd "The Voice" Rivers as Dr Lucien "Sanch" Sanchez in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace:





"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: The comedy thread

Postby justdrew » Thu Nov 10, 2011 3:42 am

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Re: The comedy thread

Postby Jeff » Thu Nov 10, 2011 10:07 am

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Re: The comedy thread

Postby Jeff » Sat Nov 12, 2011 8:23 pm

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Re: The comedy thread

Postby Allegro » Sun Nov 13, 2011 4:19 pm


:bigsmile Response to brainpanhandler's post of sounds—and earworms.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: The comedy thread

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Mon Nov 14, 2011 5:00 pm

"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

~ Joe Bageant R.I.P.

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Re: The comedy thread

Postby Allegro » Sun Nov 20, 2011 12:28 am

.
BDazzling, I love all the OWS reports-of-the-day and photos you post here at RI and in your essays. Thank you.
My best to you and Mz.
~ A.

Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: The comedy thread

Postby Harvey » Sun Nov 20, 2011 11:02 am

Here's Homer showing us how to create an infinite feedback loop:

Image


Image


Image
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
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Re: The comedy thread

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Sun Nov 20, 2011 11:43 am

Allegro wrote:.
BDazzling, I love all the OWS reports-of-the-day and photos you post here at RI and in your essays. Thank you.
My best to you and Mz.
~ A.


:hug1:

"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

~ Joe Bageant R.I.P.

OWS Photo Essay

OWS Photo Essay - Part 2
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Re: The comedy thread

Postby Jeff » Tue Nov 22, 2011 11:12 am

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Re: The comedy thread

Postby semper occultus » Tue Nov 22, 2011 11:32 am

apparently sales of taramosalata in Greece have just plummeted again for the second time this year...

...its a double-dip recession....





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Re: The comedy thread

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Tue Nov 22, 2011 11:45 am



"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

~ Joe Bageant R.I.P.

OWS Photo Essay

OWS Photo Essay - Part 2
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Re: The comedy thread

Postby semper occultus » Thu Nov 24, 2011 9:47 am

Horsesh**t economics: a new academic discipline?

treasureislands.org

There’s an awful lot of woolly thinking out there: defences of privilege masquerading as rigorous economic theory. Here are just a few headliners:

Zombie Economics – a term popularised by John Quiggin and by Paul Krugman to describe economic theories that have been thoroughly discredited by experience in the real world, yet refuse to die. Efficient market theory, for one. “The strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.” (Nowhere are the lies thicker than in banking.)

Voodoo Economics – a term coined by George H.W. Bush in 1980 to deride Reaganomics, certain tax-cut nutcases living in Laffer’s la-la land, and advocates of willy-nilly deregulation.

Cognitive Dissidents – I believe invented by Barry Ritholtz. When a person of a given mindset or ideology is confronted with facts that directly contradict their previously held beliefs. “Facts be damned, they will continue to dissent from reality for as long as it takes to get everyone else to believe as they do, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary.”

Monetary Mental Disorder– Brad DeLong. On how people put on ‘an astonishingly powerful set of blinders’ when talking about money.
There will be plenty more of these out there. Now I’ve got one to add.

I’m going to call it Horseshit Economics.

I like it for two reasons. First, as with the above afflictions and notions, it’s all about horseshit: steaming piles of nonsense, blackboard fantasy economics, fruitcake finance theory, cuckoo cash analysis, efficient market madness, and so on.

More interestingly, though, it chimes with a quote I like – which has been attributed to the economist J.K. Galbraith (but reading Galbraith himself, I wonder if it pre-dates him):

“The horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

So Horseshit Economics is really another way of talking about trickle-down economics and all the nonsense that lies behind it. The Galbraith (?) quote neatly captures the cynicism, and I think it captures the folly too.

H.E. comes in many variants, of course. You see it all the time in the newspapers (particularly in the U.S.) where the Wall Street Journal and others repeat again and again how cutting taxes on ‘productive’ wealthy people will make everyone better off; meanwhile those on benefits should have the taps turned off. Galbraith described this particular dissonance quite nicely, in the context of supply-side theory which he suggested was a cover for trickle-down:

“Let us take supply-side theory at its face value, however modest that may be. It holds that the work habits of the American people are tied irrevocably to their income, though in a curiously perverse way. The poor do not work because they have too much income; the rich do not work because they do not have enough income. You expand and revitalize the economy by giving the poor less, the rich more.”

In Treasure Islands I have quite a bit of fun with Dan Mitchell of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, looking at his arguments in favour of tax havens and his assorted words of wisdom. Most of his arguments fit, one way or another, into the ‘trickle down’ box, so I’m going to put them in my ‘horseshit’ pile, if that’s OK. (In defence of Dan, he struck me as a genuinely nice guy when I met him in Washington. I kind of hate to attack him like this. But he is perhaps the most prominent defender of tax havens, so he has to be taken to task.)

Since tax havens is my preferred topic these days, I’ll now point you to a place where I skewer (or shovel?) a whole lot more H.E. Here.
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Re: The comedy thread

Postby Jeff » Thu Nov 24, 2011 5:43 pm

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